Andrew Brookins

I’ve been trying out Sublime Text 2 as a replacement for Vim. While I enjoy using it and I experienced the “Wow, this does 90% of what Vim does” moment, I kept a running list of all the features in the remaining 10% that I relied on every day. These included: Better code wrapping (gq) …

The OS X apps iA Writer and Notational Velocity are great for writing and taking notes, respectively. I wanted to try using them together, by setting iA Writer as the external editor for Notational Velocity, but after doing so I noticed that iA Writer would not open with the keyboard shortcut (Command-Shift-E), and it was …

I finally discovered the cause of my #1 OS X problem: slow scrolling in Vim, both in Terminal.app and in MacVim. There was always a marked difference between Vim on my Mac and Vim on Linux. Scrolling with the movement keys (j/k in particular) was blindingly fast on Linux, but plodded along on my Mac so …

Clojure is a new functional language for the JVM. This post is a collection of links, articles, screencasts and free books I’ve found to help me learn the language and understand functional program design. Key features Here are some key features of Clojure that I find extremely interesting: Designed for concurrency A Lisp dialect – …

The other day, I stopped hearing any sound effects on my Toshiba Satellite work laptop, which has an Intel HDA sound card. I’m running Karmic Koala, so I rolled up my sleeves and dug into the cause. As an experienced Linux user I’m familiar with the occasional driver problems due to using computers effectively designed …

Today I ran into trouble configuring a Windows 7 guest on a Linux host: Windows 7 couldn’t find an appropriate driver for the virtual NIC. The solution was in this forum post. Basically, I had to manually edit the VMWare image’s .vmx file (while the virtual computer was turned off) and add the following line: …

I just finished deploying a Fat Free CRM install with all the under-development plugins to Heroku. Starting out with Saturn Flyer’s write-up, I learned a few things along the way, and now I have a cool Rails-based sales app to play with. Working with a read-only filesystem The biggest stumbling block I had was realizing …

Solace is a web app I created to search multiple Craigslist locations for the same query. It uses YQL to make the search, but in order to generate the YQL queries I first needed to generate a list of all valid Craigslist locations. Update: Full source code for Solace is now available on GitHub. There …